Spark (7 page)

The door opens and four men step out. Middle-aged men in suits. Two of them have bellies spilling over their belts as they pull on coats against the weather. One is thin and serious, hugging his jacket closed. The fourth is where the tether finds its connection. Squat, pug-faced and stumbling over his shoes. He turns to the thin man, mouth blistering with profanities. Though the window is up, I have no difficulty making out their voices.

Pug-face is out of control.

“You’re such a momma’s boy, Kelsy. Grow some balls,” he says, spraying spittle.

The thin man draws his lips back. “You’ve had too much to drink, Phil.”

Phil swears again. “Leave me alone, you weak son of a bitch.”

The other two step between them. “That’s enough.” One puts his hand on Phil’s shoulder and the tension in me – in Miriam – stretches like a bowstring. “I’ll get you a cab and you can go home and sleep.”

Phil shrugs him off and teeters towards the curb. The men try to catch him but Phil rights himself and ducks out of their reach, swaying as he stands to face them.

“Go to hell, Michael,” he says. “You always side with that bastard.”

The picture flickers, a lapse in time. I find myself outside the car now; warm, moist air touches my face. I run behind the fence line of the park and bound over the iron spikes, a lazy scissor leap, landing noiselessly on the pavement. The incredible sense of confidence in what my body can do holds me only for a moment, then I blur across the street into the shadows.

Phil staggers a full block away and the static in my head grows. Fear for Phil evaporates. Certainty, like a compass alert, crackles in my head. He nears a yawning alley. I know the threat lurks there. I gain quickly and slip past him as he stumbles out of the streetlight into the dark. It’s wet, black and dank with dumpsters and yesterday’s food. Bent, heaving, Phil empties his stomach in an obscene splatter at the foot of the wall. I scan the lane and my eyes adjust in seconds; the details are as distinct as the danger pulsating from the shadows.

It feels shocking to step away from Phil even as he slumps in the mouth of the alley, oblivious as I ghost through the dark. The tether stretches behind me while all my senses focus forwards. Instinct prompts me to move into the middle of the path and make no pretence of my approach. After all, I could be a waitress on her way to a late shift. I pull my phone from my back pocket and let the screen light up, pretending to text.

Oily water oozes in rivulets across the lane and I let my feet fall harder, splashing and scraping my shoes on the ground. I kick a soggy box so that it slaps against a rusted dumpster.

The threat hides behind it. I can feel him. A chemical odour fills my nose. As I pass the edge, I stop, close my phone and turn.

He stands ramrod straight. Dressed like me in black pants and jacket. He’s handsome. He’s young. Maybe nineteen or twenty. Blond, pale, taller than me. His pupils are so dilated, his eyes are black. Regret squeezes my chest for an instant, but the tug towards Phil extinguishes the feeling and anger burns in its place.

“Don’t try to run,” I say, with Miriam’s voice.

The night explodes in violence.

He swings at me, but I duck the blow like it’s happening in slow motion. Before he throws himself forwards, I see it coming and stand up under him, flipping his legs towards the narrow stretch of night sky. I watch him spiral through the air, letting him land on his feet, amazed by my – Miriam’s – sense of control.

He runs for it but I know I can take him. As I fly up behind the attacker, his intent flashes in my mind’s eye and I know he’ll reach for a battered metal canteen, jagged at the edge where it lies ripped open. He scoops it up and flings it at me and I arch to the side. It only scrapes my thigh; a lick of fire through the muscle. The flood of adrenaline propels me and I reach for him like it’s an embrace. His body is hard and strong as I pull him out of his stride, jerking his neck with the sudden stop.

Time skips again.

I shake my head as though I can shake the horror off, then notice the tether is gone. I can’t feel my feet moving across the ground, or my hands brushing against my legs. I bend over Phil, who squints up at me against the streetlight. Vomit pools on his wilted tie. A leer edges his lips. “Hello, beautiful.”

“I’ll call you a cab, Phil.”

Then the brightness of Miriam’s kitchen dazzles me. She sits back, looking pale, exhausted. Something like awe touches her expression as she stares at me. “You got all that?”

I hug my stinging hand. “That’s what you were doing in New York?”

She nods.

I close my eyes and cry.

“I don’t even know where to start with all this.” Miriam rubs her face, fingers trembling. “I’m not sure how much time we have before they come – or if they’ll come.”

There’s a hitch in my throat as I ask, “Who?”

“
Affinity
.”

Affinity sounds like a cosmetic brand or dating website, or maybe a pretentious marketing company. Though I might be thinking of Eternity or Infinity. But here, now, in this context with Miriam giving it the whisper treatment, I’ve never heard anything more creepy. My ears pop and my vision gets swimmy. A weird sense of dislocation makes me feel like I’m not all in my body and some essential part of me has come loose.

“The
Affinity Project
is the organisation responsible for what we are and what we do. They created
Optimal
, the synthetic gene in our DNA that gives us our abilities and determines our path.”

There’s irony in that last word, and trauma in the others, but I need to get things straight. “These people are coming for
me
?”

“Not at first. But when they sense you’ve
Sparked
, yes. For now, they’ll come if they’ve registered my breach in protocol.” She touches the back of her neck. “My tracker is overdue for an upgrade, it’s almost completely dissolved. They didn’t respond after the alley so there’s a chance they might not register the breach.”

Tiny white stars pop in my peripheral vision and I’m picturing a futuristic laboratory, bodies on slabs, scientists in white masks with lethal hypodermic needles. An alarm going off and heads turning to flashing red computer screens. A breach! Men in black with laser guns leaping into hover cars. Behind Miriam’s head the cupboard doors begin to pulsate.

“The tracker relays my signal to their database. It tells them where I am, if I’ve bonded with a
Spark
, deactivated a
Stray
, or if I’m injured and in need of medical attention. It also picks up on illegal terminology. Red flags. You hit enough demerits you’ll get a call from your
Watcher
. Hence the whispering, not that volume probably makes much difference. If my tracker were at full strength, I could scramble the speech receptor with a magnet.” She makes an impatient noise in her throat and rubs her face again. “Screw it. There’s too much to explain. If they call, I’ll say I was deliberately using illegal terms to get their attention.”

I barely notice Miriam’s sudden resolve. My head feels cavernous, vaulted ceilings of echoing space. You’d think with all that ballooning room the important questions could form a civilised line, biggest to smallest, from
Why God, why?
to
Do we get uniforms?
Instead, I blurt, “It’s in your neck?”

“Base of my skull. When it’s at full strength it feels like a small pea-sized lump beneath the skin.”

I feel squeamish and she says something about nano-tech and dissolving amino-acids and the stars turn supernova around me.

“Put your head between your knees.” She catches me by the shoulders. I was slumping sideways? Next I’m bent double, drooling on my charcoal silk, eyes watering at grooves in the floorboards and the scarlet enamel on my naked toes. Blood rushes in my ears. “I’m sorry.”

She rubs gentle maternal circles on my back. “I know. It’s a lot to take in.”

The clatter of the cat door, paws padding the floor, then the nudge of a soft furry skull. Buffy purrs in my ear, rubbing her whiskers against me. I want to bury my face in her fur and sob. Pressure swells my lips and face. I mumble, “Who are they, though? What do they want?”

“They were a paramilitary operation that specialised in biotechnology, genetic engineering, private security. Things got messy and then there was a change in management. Now they want to right their experimental wrongs.”

I leap at the hint of blame. “So, it’s
their
fault I’m like this and Kitty’s in danger? Affinity
made
the Stray?”

“They weren’t always the Stray. They were Strikers. Optimal amplifies the natural affinity of those with Active Frequency Sensitivity for defence or attack. The Stray are a result of a mutation in those with the attack affinity.”

I groan, no better for asking. Probably worse. Overwhelmed, my mind goes blank again. I flap my hand, bonelessly weak. “I’m bleeding.” The stain has seeped right through the bandage across my palm.

“Damn. Hold on.” She rises from the table and I tilt my head a little, catching a blur of staggering speed as she disappears up the hall, scaring Buffy who darts away to hide in the living room. Goosebumps prickle my arms and legs. A cupboard hinge squeaks through the ceiling, heavy things shift and shush over the wood floor, a pause then the whisper of movement in the hall. She’s back in the kitchen with a brown leather case and I’ve had no time to gather a coherent thought. “Keep your head down.”

“You’re so fast,” I whisper.

“Yes.” She moves above me, unzipping the case on the table. The rustle of plastic packaging, the clink of glass and metal. “We have speed, heightened senses, reflexes, strength, precognition, increased pain threshold; there’s a bunch of stuff. Oh, and your fingerprints will fade, helps make us untraceable.”

“Miriam,” I whimper, unable to take it all in. “I don’t understand. How can this be happening to me?”

The rummaging stops. “Fate? Natural selection? No
good
reason, kid. You inherited the Optimal gene from your grandmother, Kitty inherited the trigger gene from someone in her family, the two of you came together and bam.”

I jerk up, nearly cross-eyed with the rush. “Nan was like this? Not Mom, too?”

“Careful,” she steadies me. “No, Nan wasn’t genetically engineered, just a carrier like your mom.”

“Mom was normal?”

“Completely.”

The relief is intense but momentary. “What on earth was Nan into?”

“Nothing. She took pregnancy supplements. She had no clue they were laced with Optimal.” She releases my shoulders, watching to see if I’ll keel over. “That was the second generation trial.”

“They put it in pregnancy vitamins?” Stunned, I prop myself against the table, leaning heavily on my elbow like a drunk. “This is too huge.”

“Let me look at your wound.” Gently, she untucks the sopping bandage and begins to unloop it while I stare blankly into middle distance.

My brain is so murky, my thoughts break the surface half-seen. Trance-like, I begin, “How can you be sure I’m one of these protectors? A Shield? I can’t move like you or fight or anything. How can you be sure it wasn’t just a guy after Kitty’s necklace?”

She pauses mid-loop. “If he were a civ – sorry, a civilian – you wouldn’t have reacted the way you did. As to your abilities, they’ll come quickly and you’ll be trained. But it’s the tether that’s your proof, that tug behind your bellybutton. You had your hand over your stomach when you came round at the governor’s.”

I knew what she meant. It was what frightened me the most, in Miriam’s alley memory, that primal tug, more than the impossible feats of speed and strength. “I don’t feel it now.”

“You will, as soon as you get near her again. It’s the true sign of your bond.”

“It doesn’t make sense. Why would anyone want to hurt her? What did Phil do to that guy in the alley?”

“Phil didn’t do anything and neither did Kitty.” The bandage comes loose, Miriam sets it aside and we stare at the deep cut in the base of my thumb. She angles my wrist to examine it in the light. The cut glistens like a faceted ruby, glinting and hypnotic. “It’s called the Fixation Effect.” It’s what you experience when you think of Kitty, when you see her, what you feel, that sense of being drawn to her. For a Shield, it’s what compels us to protect our Spark. But for the Stray, you take everything you feel about Kitty and twist it so she no longer looks like the victim who needs your help but the virus destroying your sanity and threatening your life.”

“That’s impossible.”

She lowers my hand to the table and turns to her case. “Things are blurred for you because you already have a relationship with your Spark. You already care about her. Phil,” she rocks her head back to indicate the memory I’ve seen, “is a total bastard, who beats his wife and cheats at cards. You saw him. He’s not much different sober. Beyond a basic human decency, I have no reason to care about what happens to him, but you saw how I was, felt what I felt. I
had
to protect him.”

“You didn’t even know him?”

She arranges supplies on the table, scissors and gauze and tape. “I shook his hand at the office where I dropped off proofs after the shoot. That was it.”

I feel like I’m being pulled backwards, dragged by an undertow into rough waters. “Your whole Phil situation happened in the space of a week? A week!” My mouth snaps open and closed with the impossibility of it all. Me, facing off with some genetically engineered psychopath? I have never been in a fight in my life. If someone hit me, I’d probably burst into tears. “I can’t learn karate or whatever that was in week! How on earth will I protect her?”

“Your guy’s an amateur. If he were experienced, Kitty’d be dead. I’d say he’s only been active a few months, at most. I’ve seen this before. I’ve been here before. Trust me.”

The casual use of “dead” and “Kitty” in the same sentence stirs something darkly territorial inside me. I remember what it felt like in Miriam’s alley memory, what I felt at the governor’s when I knew Kitty was in trouble and I couldn’t get to her. Perhaps I could fight.